Page:Stories by Foreign Authors (French III).djvu/164

154 he continued. "They seized Laurette and placed her in one, before she had time either to cry or to speak. Ah! this is a thing which no honest man can ever find comfort for when it has been his doing. You may talk as you please, one never forgets such an affair. Ah, what weather this is!—what the d could have possessed me to tell you all this? Whenever I begin this, I can't stop. It is a story which makes me fairly drunk like the Jurançon wine. Ah, what weather it is! My cloak is soaked through!

"I was telling you, I believe, still about that little Laurette! Poor girl!—What clumsy people there are in the world! My sailors were so stupid as to take the boat straight ahead of the brig. After all, it's true one cannot foresee everything. For my own part, I had counted on the night to hide the matter, and did not think about the flash a dozen muskets would make, fired at once. And the fact is that from the boat she saw her husband fall into the water—shot. If there is a God up there, He only knows how what I am going to tell you took place; as for me, I know nothing about it, but it was seen and heard, as I see and hear you. At the moment of the fire, she raised her hand to her forehead, as if a ball had struck her there, and sat down in the boat without fainting, without screaming, and returned to the brig just when they wanted her, and just as they wanted her.